Sunday evening after the lectures, Suzanne and I took Jaya and Sadhanadevi out to dinner to our favorite Italian restaurant (Tonini's). The dinner once again was delicious. It was great to chat and catch up with them.
On Monday, Lakshman took us out to breakfast at the Hilton Trident. What a beautiful hotel that is. The food was great too and we were able to spend some quality time with our dear friend Lakshman. The service you get at these five star hotels are truly five star. I have been to some five star hotels (at least for business trips) in the US, but the Indian five star hotels definitely got the service figured out. You have to really be there to experience it. There are areas of the hotel we can't normally go to but at breakfast time they don't regulate it, so we took a walk towards the guestrooms. They are located around a courtyard made of reflecting pools with water trickling down the walls to a lower area where there is a real swimming pool. The rooms around this courtyard have floor to ceiling windows that face the reflecting pools. It is very cleverly designed because the constant sound of water dampens the traffic noise that you'd otherwise hear because busy streets are not too far from there. One more pleasant surprise was that when we went to the restaurant it was Swami's music playing in the background. In fact, the whole time it was Swami's music (it was Secrets of Love if I remember correctly). Lakshman said that they had given the hotel some of Swami's CDs and they were usually playing them in a shuffle with other CDs. This was the first time they played only his CD(s) the whole time.
The rest of Monday I spent with printer and networking issues. I must say it is quite challenging since there are all kinds of machines (Win2K, XP, MacOS 9.x, 10.x) that make it quite complicated to make all printers work from all machines. I don't think I have solved all the issues but hopefully it is a bit more functional than it used to be.
Suzanne has been working on getting the spreadsheets of the registrants ready for the Mumbai event. A lot of data entry with names that we don't see every day.
On Tuesday, we had a meeting with Dharmadas, Jaya, Sadhanadevi, Claudio and Deborah to go over the Mumbai lecture tour. The good thing is we have a number of Sangha members traveling to Mumbai as well as several volunteers joining us for the weekend. With all this help things should go a lot more smoothly than in Kolkata. We spent the rest of Tuesday doing more preparations for the Mumbai weekend.
We fly to Mumbai tomorrow (Wednesday) and the lecture series start on Friday evening. Dhyana arrives from Italy late tonight and she will also join us tomorrow for the Mumbai trip. We are taking SpiceJet this time (the previous one was JetAirways). It is supposed to be like JetBlue in the US, cheap with no-frills.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment